When you leave a career you receive mustering out benefits, which still can vary from something as trivial as a blade to your own ship. There are twelve careers (Agent, Army, Citizen, Drifter, Entertainer, Marine, Merchant, Navy, Nobility, Rogue, Scholar, and Scout), each with three specialisation (e.g, a Scout could be Courier, Survey, and Exploration). After that they go through a number of 4-years terms of service, with qualification tests, improvements in skill and training, survival and mishap checks, events, and in some cases commission.
These provide dice modifiers (DMs) from -2 to +2 in a semi-linear fashion, with options to go up down to 0 and go as high as 15, both of which, show incomplete workmanship the rating of 0 actually has a DM, and the rating of 15 is expressed a limited cap, contraindicated by the chapter on generating animals where one has to imply the function increase.Ĭharacters receive background skills (1-5, depending on Edu) based on the character's homeworld, plus the results of formal education. Character creation is very much like the classic rules based on 2d6 allocated rolls for Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing.
The introduction to "this is roleplaying" and "this is Traveller" is wonderfully short, and includes a nice description of play which involves our old friend, Free Trader Beowulf, along with brief descriptions of overall technology levels for different societies.
In a nutshell the book covers character generation, skills and tasks, combat, encounters and dangers, equipment, starcraft design, common spacecraft, spacecraft operations, space combat, psionics, trade, and world creation - and it does all this in under 200 pages. The writing style is both clear and to the point. The table of contents is too brief, but there's a very good index.
With one and two-column justified text and grey-scale highlights, it has a certain clean starkness about it, with page numbers and chapter titles provide on each page. The internal black-and-white line drawings is competent, usually contextual, has a certain tough style to it (rather different to the smart space operatic style of the original), but does give a sense that many pieces are fillers. Certainly one can have no complaint with the tight binding. Contrary to so many epic tomes of recent years, has taken the principle that a slimmer book is better than a fatter book, and it is one which I immediately and intuitively agree with assuming an equality of content. The book immediately reminiscent in size and style of the original Traveller hardback, with the stark black cover and red lettering, and nothing else in the way of cover art.
The Mongoose edition, in brief, is a return to the original edition in the style, rules, and setting. It has undergone many iterations, from the original publication in 1977, the expansion in the Imperium setting and rules known as MegaTraveller in 1987, a new ruleset and post-apocalyptic setting Traveller: The New Era in 1993, T4: Marc Miller's Traveller in 1996, GURPS Traveller in 1998, Traveller20 in 2002, Traveller Hero in 2006, and Traveller5 in 2013. Traveller is, of course, the classic space opera science fiction RPG from the dawn of the hobby.